While the Crimean referendum tops world media headlines, an attempt at secession is going on in Veneto, Italy, with its major city Venice. But as it is being virtually ignored by media, people in Europe are hardly aware of what’s happening next door.

“Do you mean the independence of Crimea?” says a Berlin
resident when RT’s Irina Galushko asks him of what he thinks of
the current referendum in Veneto, Italy, where people are voting
on whether to break away from Rome.

“No, I haven’t heard of it” was the most common answer
Galushko received.

The online referendum in the northern Italian province was
launched on Sunday, the same day the majority
of people in Crimea voted yes to seceding from Ukraine and joining
Russia. But unlike the Crimean referendum, the Veneto one has not
quite found itself in the media spotlight.

Nevertheless, about 3.8 million eligible Veneto resident voters
will now be able, until Friday, to say if they would like to see
the region an independent, sovereign and federative Republic of
Veneto.

Veneto is one of the biggest and wealthiest provinces in Italy
with a population of more than 5 million people. One of the main
reasons for the vote is that the region is tired of the
backbreaking burden of taxes imposed by Rome.

“We would like to continue the economic ties with
Italy,” Lodovico Pizzati, the spokesman for the independence
movement, told RT. “But from a fiscal standpoint there’s a
huge gap between what we pay in taxes and what we receive as
public service. We are talking about a difference of 20 billion
euro.”

The latest polls, suggesting that about 65 percent of the
population is in favor of becoming independent, have encouraged
the independence movement leaders finally to have the region’s
fate decided.

“We have to fight for it [independence],” Giovanni Dalla
Valle, head of the Veneto independence movement, told RT. “We
will do it in a peaceful, diplomatic way. We do strongly believe
that when the majority wants to be independent there is nothing
they [the Italian government] can do.”

Veneto independence activists say they have been inspired by
secession movements in Scotland and Catalonia.